Oh I know what that’s about now.
Yeah I was way off-base then. Telluria + Vela turned out to be the best tank + flank combo in the game by far. It ended up being much better than the Guinevere + Gravemaker combo.
Past tense, turned because that isn’t true anymore IMO. Mostly because Vela is very mediocre now.
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To answer the original question, no, I don’t believe that creating OP heroes to combat OP heroes is effective at all. This goes for any game. If that hero is so good that they overshadow the rest of the game, then you can’t possibly expect to balance the game around them.
Telluria herself wasn’t the only issue though. She was just the hero that exposed the flaws in Empires foundation. What I mean by that:
- High stats + defender bonus + soft cap for tile damage. Her high stats alone aren’t the issue, it’s how they interact with the game that makes them an issue
- Speed delay on all enemies + how charging mana works. Though this has been softened to reasonable levels, it’s still a very powerful attribute
- Emblem bottlenecks – though again addressed (too late IMO, but better late than never), this was a huge issue for why she was so powerful as attackers were at a massive disadvantage (combined with the soft-cap for tile damage).
Really it’s all of the above that contributed to what resulted so far in several nerfs to just Telluria.
And that’s the reason why we’ve continued to see several nerfs – because they haven’t actually addressed the parts of her that combine with the game features that make her so good. At least, not until recently with the emblem bottleneck being expanded.
I can’t answer on whether we’ll see more nerfs to Telluria. I don’t know that, and even the devs don’t know that and are hoping not to do that per the most previous interaction with them. But honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more that come, because I still struggle to see anyone that is better at doing what she does in the tank spot.
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To give another example: Akuma in Street Fighter II. That character is broken, because of his air projectile. The game engine just wasn’t designed to handle it – blocking it puts you in a stun animation and then he can proceed to do an unblockable setup on you. You simply are screwed whether you get hit or block it and its angle does not let you jump to avoid it.
Someone actually tried to balance him too in HD Remix. If you read the article, you’ll note that they addressed the character himself – tweaking the air fireball by making it weaker, and the other moves that allowed him to set up unblockables – but they missed a bug in the game code that only he could abuse. Thus, because the game mechanics themselves were not touched, he had to be banned again for tournament play.
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Different genres, and of course you can’t just ban a character in E&P, but the lesson is the same. You can’t expect to balance something that is sitting on a foundation with cracks. You have to clean up those cracks first.
The only sign so far I’ve seen of the devs for E&P doing that is with the expanded emblem bottleneck. Baby steps at least, and I do actually see this as a change in thinking which is good.
I’ll also tag @Gryphonknight because he really has a lot of insight in this topic.
